Hmm, the plot thickens. I suspected it might just be a regional office based in Russia covering a large area of Eastern Europe that happens to include both Russia and The Ukraine that just happens to be located in Russia, which would have been a fairly sensible choice given that it has a both a larger on-line population and better technology infrastructure. That however does not appear to be the case at all. A quick search on Google shows that FB has been looking into opening a Russian office since early 2010, well before the conflict started, but while some of the stories from 2010 talk about it in the past tense, there is speculation in the future tense about it happening from 2012, and a map of FB offices around the world shows nothing in Russia. My guess is when they say "office", they really mean "department" or "desk", and it's actually most likely based either in the EU or the US.

That would be why I wrote "Ukrainians believe", but given the obvious bias shown by certain elements of the media on both sides of the conflict I don't think it much of a stretch that this could actually be happening. My point though was more about the general problem here in that most tend to be local enough to fall within the territory of the same regional office for a given company, and that office is within a country with a stake in the conflict, let alone one that has a track record for having poor freedom of the press, then accusations like this are probably inevitable. Now that the issue has been highlighted, we can only hope that FB et al think about how they might deal with such potential censorship in the future.

Reading between the lines of the article I think you probably got the gist of what happens, but missed the crux of the complaint. I get the impression that Ukrainians believe something like this is happening:

1. 1. Pro-Ukraine poster makes a post.
2. 2. Pro-Russian bots generate complaints into Facebook's automated systems.
3. 3. The post gets automatically blocked.
4. 4. OP appeals to the Ukrainian office to get it re-instated.
5. 5. OP's appeal is denied because the Ukrainian office is actually in Russia and headed by an alledgedly non-neutral Russian.

There's definitely a potential problem there, and one that will probably be repeated in similar circumstances in the future. Seems to me that the best thing FB (or anyone else) can do in this situation is to remove oversight for posts made by both sides from regional offices in the area in question and hand them off to more neutral offices, at least for posts concerning the conflict.

Nope, just pointing out that using an absolute like "irreversible" isn't perhaps the smartest thing for the IPCC to do as it will almost certainly be seized on by the climate change deniers. Doubly so since it's demonstrably not the case except in our ability to use current science to resolve the problem.

Frankly the only things left in doubt for me about GW is just how much of a contribution mankind has made (it's certainly not zero, but I don't think it's 100% either), and whether the changes we *can* make to reduce the symptoms will have a worthwhile effect. Given enough will we can obviously reduce our GHG emissions significantly, migrate to cleaner fuels and generally move closer to living in balance with nature, but is that enough? The irony is that the more the AGW deniers are wrong about the level of our involvement, the greater the difference that we can make by changing our ways, but if they are right then we are all doomed to ride this out, wherever nature is taking us.

"Irreversible" is a very strong word, and clearly incorrect. We're not so much talking about unscrambling eggs here as something than *can* be corrected, and in all likelihood *will* be corrected, just by leaving it alone and waiting long enough. The problem for us humans here today, of course, is that we won't we around that long and in all probability neither will many generations of our decendants. I fully expect the naysayers to latch on to this in combination with the historical record showing that the earth has been warmer than this in the past as further "evidence" that the IPCC has no clue in their rebuttals over the next few days.

Not just the Registry, but it's also rapidly becoming the equivalent of "svchost.exe". I probably wouldn't have a problem with SystemD if it were designed to be *much* more modular, but the design goals for the package seem to be to embrace, extend and extinguish a significant number of other processes essential to the Linux boot process and to bring most of it straight into PID1. That's just asking for major problems if/when anything goes wrong, and makes troubleshooting a nightmare because you have one huge black box instead of a bunch of daemons. If the SystemD team want to manage network startup, system logging, firewalls and whatever else takes their fancy, then fine, go right ahead; just do it in a way that makes it easier for system admins to disable it and plug in a more fully featured and/or stable alternative, and do it as a child of PID1 so if/when it does crash it doesn't bring the whole system down with it.

If you want an eye opener take a look at the dependency list for SystemD and those packages that depend on SystemD some time, note how entries appear in both lists, then consider the following questions: Bearing in mind that SystemD is the first thing that is loaded after the Kernel; does that look like a good design to you? Does it explain why so many distros have adopted it, given that many of those dependencies either won't work without SystemD underneath or require a considerable amount of customisation to use any alternative?

Still, there's always BSD.

You missed my point, I think, I wasn't saying there was any connection with Eyjafjallajökull other than it might have prompted a slightly over cautious reaction in closing airspace before any actual airbourne dust became apparent. Sub-glacial volcanoes don't tend to throw huge volumes of ash into the atmosphere, so the main danger in the event of an eruption is far more likely to be flash floods than airbourne ash, although predicting the nature of a volcanic eruption is hardly an exact science so only time will tell. Of course, if Bardarbunga does manage to erupt with enough power to throw a sufficient volume of ash high enough into the atmosphere to cause chaos on a par with 2010 then an awful lot of ice is going to have to have been melted in the process, so there could still be a combination of physical damage from the hlaup and economic damage from disruption to air travel.

Probably just erring on the side of caution after Eyjafjallajökull in 2010. There are a whole number of ways the potential eruption, if it happens all, could go but most of them are probably not going to result in massive volumes of ash being pumped into the atmosphere; the most likely outcome being that the melting ice will cool the magma and prevent anything hazardous reaching the atmosphere. The main danger from Iceland's sub-glacial eruptions is actually the hlaup, or outflow of water from beneath the glacier in the form of a potentially devastating flash flood, which is why people have already been evacuated from the highlands. If there is an eruption, I suspect the priority with be evacuating whichever sections of the coastal lowlands are going to be in the path of any outflow (somewhere along the South coast, I suspect), rather than rerouting aircraft in the area.

Thanks for the clarification, I was leaning towards that being that case, but as others have noted that *really* need to be in the summary as it sets the tone of the entire story from "fan site shut down" to the far more accurate and far less newsworthy "site hosting lots of copyright infringing content shutdown". There's a big difference between the BBC exercising its rights to shutter outright copyright infringement and the BBC strong-arming a legit fan site for using too much content, and it's not that the latter gets DICE more page views and ad impressions.

FACT was involved, so my first guess was that they were hosting full episodes, or perhaps links to torrents, but according to TFA DWM had refused to carry any of the leaked episodes from the new series which seems unlikely for a site turning a blind eye to copyright, yet further up is the following quote: "Often times, having watched stuff there led to me purchasing the exact same content on iTunes as well as all the various other content available for Doctor Who", which implies they were hosting episodes, or at least extensive clips.

So, is this a case of major fansite being shutdown for using a more copyrighted material than the BBC was prepared to stomach (in which case where was the friendly letter asking them to "tone it down a bit, please"), a copyright infringement portal being shuttered for hosting/linking to aired episodes and other content, some kind of trademark issue, or just a domain grab by the BBC ("doctorwhomedia.co.uk" is a fairly nice domain name, afterall)?

I was thinking more of the sites that shutdown due to lack of funds, but yes, they could burn it all down when they shutter the site if they really wanted to be dicks about it. If they go to a subscription only model, then the content is still available, even if you have to pay the sub - it's just a personal call whether you think their version of the content is worth paying for of one of the free alternative sites meets your needs.

Quite. Also, even when a site is using ads there are usually alternatives that provide similar content for free. If we were able to wave a wand and magically remove all advertising companies from the Internet (or better still, existance in general), I suspect most ad-funded sites would try and transition to Tip Jars or subscriptions, the browsing public would re-distribute to different sites, and a number of sites would ultimately fold, including most of the ad-laden SEO landing pages. No actual content of value would be lost (although some might only continue to exist in the Wayback Machine) and life would go on, only without the ads and malware attack vectors that piggyback on it.

Where do I sign up?

Adblock and no script do more to keep viruses out of your stuff than antivirus.

That's actually a very good point. I haven't had a single alert from the AV component of my security suite (software on PC, host and hardware firewalls, etc.) for longer than I can remember, and that was a false positive from an installer. Then again, I whitelist cookies, JavaScript, Flash, etc., block all ads, treat all links/files I get sent with a healthy degree of skepticism, and don't tend to visit sites usually regarded as "suspect" (compromised is another matter, of course), so even the likes of SpyBot S&D and CCleaner seldom flag anything. Given how ineffectual AV is against the latest 0-day vulnerabilites and drive-bys, I'm giving serious thought to just switching off the real-time scanner and running a manual scan every week or so for peace of mind.

If we hit that bullseye, the rest of the dominoes should fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!